by Flossie on Sep.03, 2008, under Gaming
…in the browser wars.
Yesterday Google dipped it’s toes into the murky waters of internet browsing with it’s beta app Chrome. Built to take on the might of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera et al. it’s the first browser (to my knowledge) that multi-threads tabs. From the limited time I’ve played with it this seems to result in excellent speeds without any of the bloat that has recently afflicted my Firefox (ever since v3.0).
Chrome asked, on first running, whether I wanted to import my Firefox bookmarks. Can I get a “Hell Yeah!”? Good first impressions count for a lot. Memory footprint was small, pages loaded quickly. As well as Firefox bookmarks, Chrome imported my saved passwords and browser history from Firefox, another point in it’s favour as I hardly ever remember all my saved logins etc. No need to re-install Flash and I’ve yet to have a problem with a website loading, though I’ve seen reports of a few. RSS feeds are, as yet, unsupported, so if you used them a lot in FF then maybe it’s best to wait.
So far it seems like Chrome is a decent browser with a lot of potential. The signs are that plugins will be supported much in the same way as Firefox (and without Adblock any browser is going to struggle to replace FF for me). The multi-threading of the tabs is probably, for me, the best part of Chrome as it gives excellent speeds, far outperforming FF for multi-tab operations from what I’ve seen so far. As a beta app it’s polished and seems highly functional, no less than you’d expect from a company with a brand like Google.
Chrome is available here if you fancy trying it out.
